Terrorizing a Nation: Israeli Settler Violence (A Year in Review 2021)

Israeli settler violence, amounting to terrorism, is only possible to understand in the context of Israel's apartheid regime. The aim is to grab more Palestinian lands for expanding its colonial settlement project towards displacing Palestinians and moving in more illegal settlers to replace them. The aim is embodied in Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law that enshrines Jewish dominance and supremacy on the entire land of historic Palestine between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (on both sides of the 1967 borders).

For the purpose of consolidating and expanding its colonial settlement enterprise, the occupying power has seized nearly two million dunams in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, where there are roughly 720,000 Israeli settlers living today in nearly 300 illegal settlements. Both state-sponsored settlements and colonial installations (outposts) are illegal and violate international law and numerous United Nations resolutions. Israel’s settlement enterprise controls 40% of the occupied West Bank and, where Palestinian cities, towns, and villages, have been carved up into 165 separate geographic areas, and the ratio of Israeli settlers to the Palestinian population is approximately 23 settlers for every 100 Palestinians.

In this context, Israeli settler violence is an integral part of Israel's colonial enterprise, which is directed at destroying the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the establishment of an independent, contiguous State of Palestine on the 1967 borders.

This report highlights how settler violence is a form of state policy, not simply a "phenomenon", used by Israel to further oppress the Palestinian people and to serve its colonial enterprise. In the same manner, as during the Nakba of 1948, violence and terror are being used to forcibly evict Palestinians from their land for the benefit of Israeli Jews. Besides summarizing attacks in 2021, the report also provides accounts of Palestinians who suffered at the hands of settlers aided by the Israeli occupying forces.